


Maybe Hand Holding is Good for You

by underboss



Category: Sally Face (Video Games)
Genre: Fluff, Fluff and Humor, Kissing, Reader is gender neutral, Sal's mask comes OFF, hand holding, it's just soft hours yall, mentions of skin picking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-20
Updated: 2019-11-20
Packaged: 2021-02-13 13:44:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21495259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/underboss/pseuds/underboss
Summary: You have explained this to him countless times, and every time there is a witness there to account for you telling Larry this time and time again. “It’s a disorder. I have a disorder, Larrinold.”ORThe one where Sal holds your hand and you think maybe it's time to break a habit.
Relationships: Sal Fisher/Reader
Comments: 5
Kudos: 165





	Maybe Hand Holding is Good for You

**Author's Note:**

> yes yes i know i write and then disappear only to come back with a new fandom but i'm back on my sally face bullshit and i like sal holding hands. thank u goodnight

“I’m just saying, maybe you need to find something better to do with your hands.”

“That is _ literally _ not how this works, Larry.” You have explained this to him countless times, and every time there is a witness there to account for you telling Larry this time and time again. “It’s a _ disorder_. I have a _ disorder_, _ Larrinold_.” 

Larry looks at you. “You can’t just like, fight it? Or figure out something else to do?” 

“Nope. One way or another, my brain will send the signals to my hands to start picking away until my fleshy prison is soon peeled away and I look like a freshly peeled and cooked potato.”

“I’m pretty sure a peeled human doesn’t look like a potato,” Sal fills in. You stare at him.

“Fuck you, I’m absolutely a peeled potato,” you say. “Anyway, long story short, no I can’t stop. It helps to have something for my hands to do, keep busy, and even the gloves keep the worst of it away from my knuckles, but even then I may slip into the habit. I just have to keep that in check.”

“You suck at doing that,” Larry says. 

“Larry!” Sal begins, but you just punch the taller man in the shoulder. 

“Fuck off,” you say, but you’re smiling. 

“You say you have to keep your hands preoccupied, right?” Sal asks, the three of you stopping to turn into the terribly out-dated diner. It looks horrendous, truly, but the food here is the best in town. You’d eat here every night, if you could. Hell, kitchen staff probably thinks you do, with how often you and your friends were here. “What if you were holding someone’s hand? Would that be enough to distract you? Even for a little bit?”

That almost makes you stutter in the doorway as Sal holds open the door for you. But Larry is as quick to the punch as ever.

“Whoa, look at Sally Face, makin’ money moves,” he says, smirk wide on his features, but Sal just elbows him before he waves to the waitress to signal you all were there before taking your usual spot. Did you mention you guys came here a lot?

“No I’m not! I’m just helping! Or at least trying,” he adjusts, looking at you.

You, of course, have been quiet this whole time because maybe, just maybe, you had a small-kinda-sorta-big crush on Sal, and he was offering to hold your hand. This is a dumb thing to be flustered over, of course; platonic hand holding is a _ thing_. But there’s something that hits different, something that tickles the ribs and flutters the stomach when it’s the person you _ like_. Makes sense, right? Sure. 

You’ve had a crush on Sal for a long, long time. You didn’t live in the Addison apartments, but you were with these two enough to basically be a resident. The more you and Sal had hung out in your early high school days, the more you grew to like him; you couldn’t help it. He was interesting and kind and very sweet and funny and it checked off all the damn boxes. So what if he had a prosthetic? You don’t care; you like _ him_. 

“You in there?” Larry asks, knocking your shin with his foot under the table, effectively bringing you away from your reeling thoughts.

“If not, that’s fine,” Sal is adding; you hadn’t realized you’d zoned out so hard. “I just figured if there was another hand there, maybe it can draw your focus. Keep you from picking.” His voice is so… straight, so mumbled and softened by the mask. It’s deepened over the years, but it’s soft still. It makes it hard to tell his tone. You wouldn’t call him monotone, but he can definitely come off as deadpan to the wrong person.

“No no, it’s fine,” you say. “I just, y’know. Hadn’t thought of it before. Can’t hurt to try.” Isn’t holding hands supposed to be good for you anyway?

“Cool.” And then his hand sets itself on the table, and you find yours fitting into it, fingers lacing together. His hand is cold, colder than you anticipated. Even through your gloves, you can feel it from your fingertips. Has Sal always been this cold?

“Woooow, look at you two,” Larry commented, stretching across his side of the booth. With Sal sitting next to you, Larry had that whole side of the booth to himself. He needs it, you decide, he’s too long. 

“Shut up, Larrinold,” you say, and Sal is quiet, and you’re not sure what to make of it, but he holds your hand pretty securely, fingers laced together. You’re so distracted by the weight of his hand in yours that you manage to get through the lunch with little to no picking. 

Maybe hand holding _ is _ good for you.

—————

“You’re going to damage those.”

You barely take notice, looking like the poster child for a freeze-frame of the protag of some dumb sitcom character who just got doing something dumb as your eyes flicker towards Sal. Oh, what a face you must have on you now. 

“Huh?” The word is distorted, twisted by the way you had your lip in a grip between your forefinger and thumb. The skin you had been pulling on was right in your grasp, borderline painful, considering you tugged on this spot a lot.

“I said, you’re going to damage those. Your lips.” Sal takes a minute to gesture towards the prosthetic on his face, right over where his mouth would be. Before, you used to wonder how he knew where anything was on that mask, why he was able to pinpoint where things _ should _ be on his face, but the more you hung out with him, the more you realized it was just second nature to him. That wasn’t his _ face_, but it was a part of him that he still knew. Just as much as you knew your own face. And hands. 

You let your lip go. “Nah, no more than they’re already damaged.” Still, you’re flustered you’ve been caught. You knew your habits, and the unfortunate reality of living with a literal disorder, and Sal knew of them, too. That doesn’t mean you like to be caught while in the clutches of those particular things. 

“I can’t imagine it’d be good to keep picking at them like that,” Sal comments. “You do it all the time. Even when you try not to and your lip is in shreds, you do it.” He’s observant. You feel like his eyes are trained on you. You know what your lips look like; bloodied almost constantly, chapped, splitting at the seams. They threaten to tear right open any time you smile a little too widely. It’s never a good look, and no amount of chapstick will really help; shit’s fucked. 

“Oh it’s not,” you agree. You try to ignore the overwhelming urge to touch your mouth. 

“Is there anything you can do to help it?” Sal is always so genuinely interested when he asks you things. You two were supposed to be studying for Sal’s upcoming abnormal psychology exam while you waited for Larry to get out of work for the day, but sometimes you take breaks and sometimes those breaks happen go last a thousand years. Studying is useless anyway.

You shrug, setting the book aside. “Not unless I want to look into therapy and different medications. It’s hard to just nail something like this down to a definite box of a cure that says ‘Here you go, now you’ll never get the overwhelming urge to pick off your skin again!’ It’s a whole thing, y’know? No one even knows what causes it. It’s just a thing.” You gesture vaguely with your hand.

“Yeah, I get it.” Sal nods, and he doesn’t say much after that. He’s always so quiet, even when it’s just the two of you. He’s been especially quiet around you after he’s started holding your hand to keep you from picking at your skin, but even now, he seems deep in thought, always lost, hands in their own respective places.

You kinda wish he would hold your hand again.

“Bet your mouth looks better than mine,” you joke instead, giving him a small and playful grin. You’ve never actually seen under his mask; it’s not exactly your place to ask, either. The joke is simple and light-hearted, something to keep your conversation going. You had a feeling you two weren't about to go back to talking about brain messages during a bout of psychosis again.

Sal snorts. “I doubt that,” he says. “In case you forget, this is a prosthetic.” He points to his mask. “It’s not really hiding anything pretty under here.” 

“My mouth isn’t exactly pretty either, in case you missed me literally tearing at it just a second ago. I can do a slow-mo recap, if you need.”

“No, thanks. And I disagree.”

“About what?”

“Your mouth not looking nice.”

You stop. You stare. He’s so monotone about it that it nearly drives you crazy; you’re pretty sure you _ are _ crazy, somehow, but your heart feels too loud in your chest for you to really contemplate your real mental state. Your thing for Sal Fisher grows every time he does something like this. You almost wonder if he does it on purpose.

“Funny, Fisher,” you say, shaking your head. You will down the flush in your cheeks; the red chooses to stay in the tips of your ears instead.

“But I mean it. Here, look-“ He stops his sentence then, setting aside his books to begin unfastening the mask. His fingers were quick, nimble, familiar motions that you were certain he could do in his sleep.

“Sal, you don’t-“ But you don’t get to finish, because the bottom of his mask is moving upwards, and it’s so strange to see anything but the white prosthetic that you almost don’t recognize him. 

His face is marred beyond belief, deep gashes digging out chunks of skin and muscle where most of his face should be. They’re almost all pink and silvery now, healed over time. A chunk of his right nostril is missing, and you’re pretty sure that’s a glass eye. His lips are scarred and torn, like something grabbed the corner and pulled; if you look, you can see his teeth poking out, ever so slightly. It’s mostly the right side of his face that seems to have gotten the worst of whatever happened to him, but the lines draw over towards the other side of his face. He’s marred and scarred and it’s so different and new that you can’t help but look.

He points to his mouth, looking at you. You can tell he’s gauging your reaction. You can tell the staring is probably putting him off. “See? Your mouth looks way nicer than mine. I’m all jagged.” 

Your hand moves before you can stop it, and you watch it come up to gently touch over the jagged lines of his mouth. The touch is strange, foreign, rough under your fingers as you move closer to touch more. Soon, your hand slides to cup his cheek, thumb resting in the corner of his mouth, and your words are breathy as you speak. “Can you feel it?”

“...Yeah.”

Your eyes slide up to meet his, and suddenly, it’s like something snaps into place, like a connection was made and the wires were crossed in all the right ways. It’s crazy, how it happens. You’ve only heard about it in movies.

Sal moves first, and his lips are over yours and it’s such a strange sensation. Not bad, really, but it’s new and it’s exciting and it’s _ Sal kissing you_. Your free hand comes up to cup his other cheek while his find homes in your hand and on your hip. He’d surged forward so fast that you end up falling backwards, but you’re so busy with kissing and trying to wrap your head around the whole thing that it makes your brain spin in all directions. 

You’re so busy kissing that you don’t even register the door opening. 

“Hey guys, sorry I’m late I just—_ what the fuck_.”

That pulls you two apart, and there’s Larry, standing in Sal’s doorway with an almost disgusted look on his face. “Hey, Larry,” Sal says. It’s so casual. Like you two weren’t just kissing or anything.

“What the hell are you guys studying? Fuckin’ anatomy?”

“Abnormal psychology,” you supply.

“You— whatever man, I’m gonna go make Todd make me a sandwich. Come get me when your little makeout date or whatever is over.” Larry shuts the door behind him on the way out, leaving you and Sal alone again. 

“Whoops,” Sal says, and he turns his attention back towards you now, but there’s a cheeky smile on his features and you can’t help but smile back. “So do you believe me now? That your mouth is nicer than mine?”

“Mm. Nope, sorry. Might need more proof, maybe a thesis paper and a detailed explanation,” you answer, and Sal just snorts, rolls his eyes before he gets off of you and helps you up. 

“At least I know a new way to keep you from tearing your lip again,” he says, and you can’t help but laugh. 

Who says you can’t break old habits with new ones?

**Author's Note:**

> i swear i'll try not to disappear for months this time


End file.
